STUDYING THEIR VOCATIONS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 95, 17 February 1947, Page 8

STUDYING THEIR VOCATIONS

EUROPEAN STUDENTS How young European students— Lazio, Alice, Helmut, Tschang-Juan, Helene, Marie and others—have managed somehow to study their vocations even in the midst of their wartime displacement problem is told by Miss Edith M. Gates, representative in Europe of the American Christian Committee for Refugees, in an American newspaper. Miss Gates went to Europe in one of the wartime convoys and spent most of her time in Switzerland. She listened to the problems of the teen-age students who were driven from their homes or universities by war. With A. C. C. R. funds, the help of the Swiss. Government, and other agencies she was able to set up minimum vocational training programmes for more than a hundred students. Many of. these students still are engaged in their studies, although they face new problems with a decision by the Swiss Government that Switzerland cannot afford to be a permanent stopping-off place. The students must soon move on, Miss Gates reported. Twenty-three .short trade courses were set up by Miss Gates in cooperation with Swiss schools and industries. These ranged from engineering to photography. Approximately 17 nationalists were represented in the programme. Miss Gates said the A. C. C. R. paid special attention to those groups of- students who seemed to have no special category, namely, diverse Protestant groups and some members of orthodox churches.

Lazio Szabo, a young Hungarian, who had studied art in Budtpase fled to Switzerland by swimming across an outlet to Lake Constance in midwinter, 1944. Through the A. C. C. R. he was finally placed in Geneva’s L’Ecole de Beaux Arts where he was permitted to study sculptoring with the objective of becoming an architectural sculptor. Helene Pogorelova was a young White Russian girl whose father was a novelist. The family moved from Odessa to Germany to gain political freedom in 1933. So long as M. Pogorelov wrote non-political novels he was unmolested by the Nazis. Germany became inhospitable in 1938 to the family, which fled first to Vienna, then to Switzerland. There Helene, with the assitance of the A.C.C.R., entered Professor Velleman’s Interpreters School, a department of the University of Geneva. She became so proficient in German, Russian, French, English, Spanish, translating from one language to another, that she was rushed to Nuremberg for the war crimes trials, where she was the youngest but one of the best interpreters.

A young Chinese, Tschang-Juan, was a student of industrial chemistry in Switzerland When war broke out over Europe. His funds were frozen. He could neither get a job nor leave Switzerland. Although not a part of the war he was a victim of the war. He seemed to belong to no one. There the A.C.C.R. found him helped him continue his chemical course and used its influence with the Swiss Government to grant him part-time work to earn his board.

An orphan of war, Alice Monique Ullman, was enabled through the A.C.C.R. to study photography at Lausanne. She became successful in her news and advertising photography and thinks she may find a professional spot some day in America.